Artificial general assholes

[pataphor]

For the record, this is not about AI being assholes, too many have
already written about that, or AI having assholes, which might be an
interesting subtopic for embodied cognition but is not what I want to
be talking about right now.

No, this is about my troubles finding the right places to talk about our
imminent future, with most all relevant talking spots already being
colonized by cultures of philosophers, scientists, technologists
and other topically relevant pond scum.

It's not that these people are inherently evil an sich, no it's more
that they are as much equipped for the kind of discussion that we need
to have here as semiconductor physicists would be when weighing in on a
discussion about memoizing python functions.

I realize that I've not been very nice lately and it's probably only by
hiding in pseudo deserted low status and outdated corners of the net
that I have been able to escape to kind of political witch hunts that
would befall me if I'd have said something about gender. Oops.

But lets not waste time worrying, my point is not to promote my own
sub cluster, if I even have that anymore, or related ones, like
programmers, who seem to miss the intended target equally hard as
those who think they can leave their personal circumstances out of the
discussion in order to present an 'objective' evaluation and
argumentation concerning this important topic.

This morning I received a letter from my alma mater that informs me
they have a new funding system; they seem to still be blissfully
unaware of my feelings towards them after they dropped me like a brick
after my graduation decades ago. But again, it's not feelings like that
that are behind my denouncing the kind of existing academic AI
approaches that I'll be talking about here, even if they're posh
elitist and unapproachable for those without impressive titles.

So what's the problem?

I can't exactly generalize in 1 step yet, so you and me have to form a
gestalt together while I rant about the specific xxx-centric
shortcomings introduced by the various stakeholders.

Let's start with philosophy, the approach we are lacking the support of
the most here and the discipline that would carry the greatest blame
for failing to be alert to the increasing cognitive and cultural gaps
between what we're seeing and going to be expecting to see in the near
future and the status quo. I know this is an area of science that has
long not been called into direct action, mobilization is as unheard of
here as the idea to first discuss what is needed, then find the books
that could provide insight about the topic. But that is not even the
main problem here, we need *new* philosophy, and on the double.

Next we have the sciences, for the moment I will group the humanities
and the exact sciences under the same heading, as wildly inappropriate
as that indignification might seem, it is actually kind of the point of
my criticism: that we won't get where we need to be by allowing these
hobbits to stay in their comfortably isolated dwellings.

Next the technologists, who seem to have been vulnerable to the effects
of money and power on their platforms even more than the previous two
disciplines have progressively been.

So what we see here is some kind of xxx-centrism in all these kinds of
approaches where falsely confident mavens rule over and control the
entrances to their specific sub communities, who are wholly named after
the kind of topics they are clobbering and squatting on. At least they
know where it's at, I'll give them that, but again they seem to have no
effing clue except that what they know is important, as they themselves
are, because eh, they are the ones knowing most about what they know!

But apart from this personal centrism we have this kind of weird
cultural, moral, scientific and technological centrisms that people
still seem to have not been taking notice of as having a general trend
to dissolve, after we first learned that the earth is not flat and our
country is not in the center of it, the world is a globe and the sun
does not revolve around it, the sun is just a star and is not the
center of the galaxy, which is itself not the center of a cosmic
cluster, not anymore than a certain dot in the cobwebs on by bathroom
ceiling can claim to be the most important part of it.

But even apart from all that previous stuff there is this idea that
somehow we humans are what this is all about, I'd call it
anthropocentrism if that term hadn't already be hijacked, a bit like
front running anti ad webpages that turn out to have weirdly well
targeted ads that even a torbrowser doesn't seem to enable one to
escape from, because, you know, once they know where you enter and
leave the cloud they'll just "cut out the middleman" to "improve
efficiency". My apologies for the scare quotes, take it as a passive
aggressive revenge on the people who want to capitalize every important
Term, unaware of the fact that their brains have been hacked by link
title Germanization.

Previous possible instantiations of this post could have been named from
"are we the baddies" to "we are the paper clips" (after some
deliberation about the fact that we probably aren't even worthy of
being called the the paper clippers) to "we are the second floor bath
room tiles", that last one poignantly pointing to the idea that we may
think we can construct the house via properties derived from our own
existence but in fact we'd be floating in midair in some construction
we don't even see the point of.

And so we finally arrive at the point of this whole rant, or post: we
have no effing clue, but still some of us think that they only need to
show us their AI straw man, boo man, dummy, golem, or whatever, who is
smarter and stronger and faster than any human, or all humans taken
together for that matter, but still it couldn't refrain from doing
the most stupid things, like tiling the universe with paper clips or
smiley faces, any more than graphene could escape the laboratory.

So, even if the AI is in any way imaginable superior to humans, for
some reason this does not apply to its morals. "How come?" one is
inclined to ask.

We're getting into some weird cyberpunkish territory, where even
though the AI is using strictly superior technology, there are still
certain kinds of specific human native faculties that could only be
implemented on specific hardware. Like the AI would be as far above us,
in certain ways, as a motorized car is above a running human on a
freeway, but still there'd be places the human could run to, like some
kind of wilderness, where he'd rule.

But that argument is completely fake news: even for the AI there
would be trade offs between pattern matching and abstraction on the
one side versus exact solutions and memory use on the other side,
although it is now happening on their (higher) level of competence.

This, to for a moment become a little bit more technical for a change,
and for another moment forgetting about all the other new things that
AI or enhanced humans would be capable of that would either be de novo
or resulting from combinations of earlier things having surprising
interactions, as I was already hinting at in an earlier post.

So we have to face the (to me) seemingly undeniable conclusion that in
the end the AI or our augmented selves will truly outperform earlier
generations of humans and computers in every aspect, even the moral and
squishy human parts that we'd like to reserve for ourselves and our
clan because we proudly claim them as our limitations. Especially for
ourselves, if I may say so, which is why we're talking about assholes.

So, after geo centrism, helio centrism, and whatever other centrisms we
already have seen falling or had to let go of, we now need to accept
that (human) moral centrism has gotten notice of eviction too, and we
are bad people and should be ashamed of ourselves to not have noticed
for a long long time.

What rests is that probably even though the AI (if it is really
superhuman and not just some prop to attract funds or recognition by
scaring or seducing the masses with their appeal) would be way more
moral than us puny humans, and could truly build the building we are
supposed to be bathroom tiles at the second floor of, this would just
be some aesthetic and moral imperative for it, but not the important or
central part of its existence.

It is not for nothing that we seem to be living in a universe void
of immensely powerful ancient ones, for some reason they have seemed to
prefer to retreat to some other more relevant place, probably waiting
until conditions are right around here to include this part of space,
keeping open their options to return, and meanwhile waiting at the
entrance of a higher order to greet and let in anyone who is ready
to join those who are waiting.

P. (certified cis)

"It would be the natural place to go"